VMware is taking some big steps in the security and network management arena with its vShield product set. I sat in on a deepish dive into the somewhat new security products being offered by VMware to deliver on the ‘secure’ part of their “Secure Hybrid Cloud” initiative.
The speakers went through each of the three offerings, …

COMMENTS

So... what else is new?

It sounds like this is mainly some firewall/IDS stuff moved onto the virtualization mumbo jumbo, complicating those even more, increasing the complexity of every aspect your basic security foundation (both the machine infrastructure and your add-on-top-secrurity devices). The news here may be that there are fewer clicks, for a perhaps even worse configuration.

What is really the problem with hypervisors is when the hypervisor gets cracked (as has happened with for example VMWare), and/or when your insecure (as they typically are) storage network gets compromised. But these things are harder to solve, and doesn't sell VMWare, so of course they don't talk about that. Or really , they aren't hard to solve, you just can't do it with the VMWare vision of running all your (virtual) machines in one big fat multimillion dollar VMWare cluster. Instead you just have to think through what things can fall together, and cluster those. Then you separate the clusters. And that you can do with free software too, there is no need to buy a whole deck of crappy proprietary windows apps from VMWare to "manage" your hypervisors.

What Is Virtualisation Exactly?

Does anyone know of anywhere I can get some free advice on virtualisation and security? I'm wondering exactly how this could benefit our business and all the decent advice online appears to involve a membership fee.

Virtual security: Even better than the real thing?

"Customers using vShield can cut security costs by 5x compared to today’s current state-of-the-art...". What kind of statement is this? 5 times? You can't cut off the same arm 5 times so how can you do that with costs?